The Dumb Ox (1974)

The Dumb Ox (1974)
Aka: Kung Fu Strongman; Return of the Panther
Chinese Title: 大鐵牛
Translation: Big Iron Bull

Starring: Kam Kong, Nancy Yen Nan-See, Lung Fei, Shan Mao, Addy Sung Gam-Loi, Ma Chi, Kwan Hung, Lei Jun, Tai Bo, Gam Ming, Wu Ma
Director: Wu Ma
Action Director: Leung Siu-Chung, Gam Ming (Tommy Lee)

Wu Ma as a director was a bit uneven in comparison to his colleagues like Sammo Hung and Yuen Woo-Ping, or his mentor, Chang Cheh. He worked a lot with Chang Cheh in the early 1970s, co-directing films like The Water Margin; All Men are Brothers; and The Pirate. Incidentally, The Pirate is generally considered to be one of the lesser Chang Cheh films during his Shaw Brothers tenure. But beyond that, Wu Ma’s solo career was very much hit-or-miss. For every Kick Boxer or Deaf Mute Heroine, there was a Kung Fu of 8 Drunkards. The best I can say that he was decent workman director: competent and reasonably entertaining most of the time, with the occasional moment of brilliance or dip into utter mediocrity.

The Dumb Ox is actually one of his better solo efforts, so far as I have seen. The film opens with a trio of men walking through the countryside with a whole lot of money they’ve accrued through their business dealings. One of them warns his friends about bandits, but the other says, “We’re from King Village, nobody dare mess with us.” Just then, a trio of masked men appear. One of the villagers is hung and the other two are beaten to death. The leader of the robbers, whom I’ll call ‘Boss’, reveals himself to be Addy Sung (The Four Robbers and Crystal Fist). He tells his two still-masked cohorts that he has some business in another city and tells them to hang tight.

Cut to King Village, where a stranger (Jimmy Wang Yu regular Lei Jun, of One-Armed Boxer and Beach of the War Gods) is harassing the local blacksmith. I’ll call him ‘Bounty Hunter,’ because it’s revealed that it is his occupation. The local Whore (Ting Hsiang, of Chiu Chow Kung Fu and The Legend of Mother Goddess) informs Bounty Hunter that the blacksmith is known as the Dumb Ox (Kam Kong, of A Girl Called Tigress and Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin) because he almost never talks. And he’s big and strong. Whore invites Bounty Hunter to her place for a good time, but he informs her that he’s broke and she loses interest.

Switch to the house of the town’s richest man, whom I’ll call “Dad” (Ma Chi, of The Brave and the Evil and The Killer Meteors). Dad has hired a duo of kung fu masters (Taiwanese regulars Lung Fei and Mao Shan) to teach his men kung fu. Dad’s son (Kwang Hung, another Jimmy Wang Yu regular) and daughter (Nancy Yen, of Ma Su Chen and The 7 Grand Masters) are also learning kung fu, of which the latter is the most promising. They all find out the aforementioned killings and start a patrol to keep an eye out for bandits. Bounty Hunter finds a metal contraption at the site of the murders and begins to suspect the Dumb Ox is involved.

We learn that the Dumb Ox was indeed once a bandit working under the Boss, although he was captured after killing a man during an escape and served time for his crime. It turns out that Bounty Hunter was present when the Dumb Ox was being paraded through the streets after his capture and now that crimes are happening in the area, the former suspects the latter is up to his old tricks. It doesn’t take much for him to convince the villagers, who are now in Angry Mob mode, to take their anger out on the Dumb Ox, too. The only person who doesn’t initially suspect him is Nancy, although enough coincidences occur that even she begins to wonder at some point.

Long story short, those other two masked killers are the two kung fu instructors, and they are not above trying to stoke up public sentiment against the Dumb Ox in order to hide their own crimes. The Bounty Hunter eventually relents and gives the Dumb Ox the benefit of the doubt, but when he finds out what’s really going on, he learns that his kung fu is just not good enough for the situation he finds himself in. So, the Dumb Ox is not going to have anyone to vouch for him when things get really violent…

The Dumb Ox is a sort of kung fu Les Misérables, with the Dumb Ox being our high-kicking Jean Valjean and the Bounty Hunter being the Javert equivalent. The film dwells a lot on how prejudiced people can be whenever dealing with someone with a criminal past, even though they themselves have gone straight and just want to be left alone. It takes very little for the villagers to get riled up against the Dumb Ox and once that happens, everything that happens around him serves to feed their Confirmation Bias. The villagers attack him, he fights back in self defense: he must be guilty. He pushes Son aside and an object falls on his leg and breaks it: he must have purposely maimed him. And so forth.

Eventually, the villains do overplay their hand and are forced to reveal themselves to the public. Even then, the Dumb Ox is forced into the moral quandary of “Do I help the people who have been treating me like crap for the past few weeks?” He eventually relents and does the right thing, leading into our climax. Nancy, who has waffled back and forth until now, joins him and puts her life on the line to stop the bad guys, although by the time the dust settles, the damage is done. The Dumb Ox can no longer live with the people he helped, even if he was the one who saved him. And sadly, the only person who is truly sad to see him go is the Whore, the closest thing he had to a friend.

I enjoyed the story, which is buoyed by some strong fight action courtesy of Leung Siu-Chung and Tommy Lee. Those two were collaborating on a lot of classic Bashers at the time, including Gold Snatchers; Black Panther; and The Two Cavaliers. They worked especially well with Polly Shang-Kuang Ling-Feng, staging the fights in her best bashers: A Girl Called Tigress; Seven to One; and Lady Whirlwind and the Rangers. They worked quite well together and we know that Tommy Lee (aka Gam Ming) would go on to be one of Taiwan’s best old school choreographers. Meanwhile, Leung Siu-Chung would never quite become one of the greats, but he did excellent work with Billy Chong in the latter part of his career.

The fights in this are very good by early 1970s basher standards. To be honest, this may be my favorite pure fighting performance by Kam Kong. Master of the Flying Guillotine may be his most iconic performance. And some of later villain roles like in Iron Monkey and The Crane Fighters required him to do more challenging shapes choreography. But this is the movie I’ve seen of his so far that really made the most of his training under Tan Tao-Liang. Unlike John Liu, who aped a lot of what Master Tan had taught him, Kam Kong doesn’t go for the flashy double/triple kicks or hop kicking. Instead, he just does the basics: side kicks, roundhouse kicks, etc. But he does them with altitude and power (his large frame helps sell the latter), which was often missing in basher movies. So, if you want to see what Kam Kong was all about, I suggest you watch this film (and Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin).

I don’t know if Nancy Yen was an actual martial artist, but if not, she fakes it quite well. She was the best thing in Ma Su Chen (of course, it was her movie) and she does good work here. Reliable veterans like Lung Fei, Shan Mao and Addy Sung also put in credible fighting performances. Shan Mao spends much of the latter part of the movie fighting with a sharpened iron circle hooked to a chain, which almost feels like a super-simplified flying guillotine. Addy Sung is presumably Opera trained, so his moves are a little flashier than those of his co-stars. Weapons are generally kept to the basics: poles and the odd spear or two. Standard basher procedure.

Between this and Wits to Wits (aka From China With Death), Wu Ma did well for himself in 1974. Too bad he could not always keep it up with this level of quality. But we all love him just the same.

Shamo (2007)

Shamo (2007) Chinese Title: 軍雞 Translation: Military(ized) Chicken

Starring: Shawn Yue, Annie Liu Xin-You, Francis Ng, Masato, Dylan Kuo Pin-Chao, Bruce Leung Siu-Lung, Ryo Ishibashi, Pei Pei Wei-Ying, Terri Kwan Wing, Hiromi Nakajima, Takuya Suzuki

Director: Soi Cheang

Action Director: Jack Wong Wai-Leung

Shamo is based on a Japanese manga of the same name, which tells the story of a young man who serves a term in a correctional facility for murdering his parents. While there, he learns karate from another one of the inmates, who is a karate master-cum-revolutionary. Once on the outside, he becomes a professional fighter of extremely questionable morals, often employing underhanded means (psychological warfare, blackmail, and even rape) in order to get the upper hand. In other words, the character of Shamo is a complete heel and a true antihero.

This live-action adaptation of the manga was brought to us by Soi Cheang, who is best known these days for martial arts films like SPL 2: A Time for Consequences and Walled In: Twilight of the Warriors. However, when this movie was made, Soi had previously made the ultra-bleak and ultra-violent crime thriller Dog Bite Dog, which is a hard film watch (let alone re-watch for the purpose of reviewing). Considering that film revolved around a professional assassin who was only marginally worse than the cops trailing him, making a movie about an unsavory character like Ryo Narushima seemed like a understandable idea.

The film opens with an idyllic family breakfast at the Narushima household. Ryo (Shawn Yue, of Dragon Tiger Gate and The Invisible Target) and his sister, Natsumi (Pei Pei, who played the mute love interest in Dog Bite Dog), are at the table enjoying a meal with their parents. The film cuts to Ryo being taken to prison as we learn that he has violently murdered his parents and confessed to the same. Ryo’s experience in prison is not a fun one: he regularly beaten, tortured, and raped by both the inmates and guards (led by the warden, played by War’s Ryo Ishibashi). He receives one visit from his sister, Natsumi, who announces that she has become a prostitute because of Japan’s culture of ostracizing anyone related to criminals, even if they themselves have done nothing wrong.

After one of his daily beatings, Ryo is about to slit his own throat on a broken toilet when he rescued by a new inmate, Kenji Kurokawa (Francis Ng, of The Mission and A Man Called Hero). Kurokawa is a karate master who was thrown in jail for murdering the Prime Minister—I’m surprised he didn’t get the death penalty for that—and is allowed by the Warden to teach karate to the inmates. Yeah, way to make hardened criminals even more dangerous. He sees potential in Ryo Narushima and teaches him, which makes Ryo strong enough to fight back against his tormentors.

Due to his being a minor, Ryo is let out after a two-year stint (unlike California, where violent offenders are often transferred to normal adult prisons after serving part of their sentence at the CYA). He dyes his hair blonde, becomes a gigolo (servicing overweight women), and is a general bully among the dregs of Japanese society. He meets a prostitute named Megumi (Annie Liu, of Invincible Dragon and The Great Grandmaster), whose nome de guerre is Natsumi. They become lovers after some initial conflict; Ryo has no problem beating women in this. A fight with some of the employees at Megumi’s hostess club spills over into a stadium where an MMA fight is being held. Ryo catches the attention of several of the big wigs from the Banryu Group, including group founder Kensuke Mochizuki (Bruce Leung, of Broken Oath and Four Shaolin Challengers) and split-off dojo leader Ryuichi Yamazaki (Dylan Kuo, of Skiptrace and Hyperspace Rescue).

Ryuichi tries to bring Ryo Narushima to his dojo to train in order to become a professional fighter in the Lethal Fight (LF) circuit—this film’s UFC equivalent. However, Ryuichi is challenged by Mochizuki and loses…and then is challenged by Ryo, and loses. His character more or less disappears from the film at this point, which makes me wonder what the point of the subplot is. Mochizuki tells Ryo that he can participate in the LF and to wait for a phone call. A fight is set up between Ryo and a Thai boxer, and he starts training. At this point, Kenji Kurokawa shows up—he got out of prison early, but the reason for that will be explained later—and starts training Ryo. Ryo wins his first professional match, winning only by a sliver when he whip-kick’s his opponent in the eye and blinds him. Mochizuki kicks Ryo out of the LF, but since Ryo is determined to fight the current champion, Naoto Sugawara (ISKA welterweight champion Masato), he resorts to underhanded means in order to get the fight scheduled…

Shamo is a Japanese/Hong Kong co-production. Most of the main cast members are from Hong Kong, as is the director and fight choreographer. Many of the people behind the camera are Japanese, as are most of the producers. The film is set in Japan (although parts were filmed in Thailand, hence a lot of Thai names in the smaller roles) and the characters are Japanese, although everybody speaks Cantonese in the movie. It is a weird mixture of cultures.

I have not read the Shamo manga, but gleaning over the synopsis at Wikipedia, it appears that this film covers the first two or three story arcs of the series. What is most noticeable in the story is how it feels like Soi Cheang actually diluted Ryo Narushima’s antiheroics in comparison with the source material. The original character was not above doing all sorts of awful, often criminal things in order to win. In this film, Ryo Narushima is a jerk, sometimes a woman-beating jerk, but he is not a complete monster. He threatens to rape Naoto Sugawara’s wife (or girlfriend), but never follows through with it, like he apparently does in the manga. Characters say that he is cruel, but he rarely comes across that way, except maybe when he’s fighting Ryuichi Yamazaki. Instead, he comes across as a bully whose bark is worse than his bite and often takes more than he dishes out. There are some other last-minute revelations that change the way we see his backstory.

Reviews point out how the dialog tries to be profound, but often comes across as weird and absurd. Case in point, while Ryo is training for his fight with the Thai boxer, Kenji shows him a reflection of the moon in a puddle and strikes it with a katana, telling him that if he can “split in the moon in half,” he’ll be ready for the fight. So, Ryo cuts himself and splatters a line of blood across the reflection of the moon, thus “splitting” it in half. Does this have anything to do with his training? No. Does it have anything to do with how he fights his opponent? No. So what was the entire point of the scene?

So what is the point of the movie? I’m not sure. It’s about a guy who studies karate in prison and goes on to become a professional kickboxer, but it’s not even really about the fights. Or at least Soi Cheang and choreographer Jack Wong don’t stage the fights to stand out from the rest of the movie. Jack Wong has spent most of his career working with other, more famous action directors, but in the past few years has gotten more acclaim for his individual choreography jobs, like Warriors of Future. The fights are all about karate and kickboxing and are staged fine, but the choreography is not particularly complex. There is also a bit of shaky cam and quick cuts in a lot of the fights, perhaps to create a comic book panel feel to the fights? There is one sequence where we see Ryo fighting some thugs inside a stadium. We see the footage of the professional fight clearly, while the other fight is depicted entirely with dueling shadows. Interesting from a visual standpoint, but choreography fans will be left wanting.

My main issue with the fighting is that Ryo is portrayed as the underdog for the entire movie. Even when his training has progressed, he often gets into group brawls with (supposedly) untrained people and gets beaten up despite being better than the people he’s fighting. The same goes for the professional fights: he gets done dirtier than Rocky in the ring, without the cathartic comeback at the end. Maybe director Soi Cheang wanted the fights to be subversive, much like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives. It is weird to see this movie about a jerk training in karate and growing in his training, only to get his ass handed to him at almost every turn. But between the thuggishly unlikeable main character, questionable decisions in fight editing and direction, and an awful TV-movie score, I cannot really recommend Shamo to anyone.

The Big Boss Part 2 (1976)

The Big Boss Part 2 (1976) Chinese Title: 唐山弟子 Translation: Tangshan Disciples

Starring: Lo Lieh, Wang Ping, Preeva Prongernaug, Krung Srivilai, Michael Chan Wai-Man, Lee Kwan, Hung Wang, Bruce Le, Gam Biu, Ho Pak-Kwong

Director: Chan Chue

Action Director: Yuen Cheung-Yan

The Big Boss Part 2 for a long time was a lost movie. Or not necessarily lost, but pretty close. I believe there were a few copies in reel form floating around out there, some in the hands of African collectors—kung fu movies were huge business in Africa—and one that that some point found its way into Quentin Tarantino’s hands. A couple of collectors also had copies of the limited VHS of this, too. The Tarantino copy was shown at the New Beverly Cinema back around 2021, so a few fans lucky enough to live in Southern California were able to catch it. But for the rest of us, it wasn’t until Severin Films released their Game of Clones: Brucesploitation, Volume 1 box set in 2024 that it became available to the general populace—granted you got the limited collector’s edition directly from their website.

The movie picks up some time after the original film, with Cheng Chao’an (Bruce Le, of Bruce and Dragon Fist and Enter the Game of Death) rotting away in a small jail cell in Thailand after killing the titular Big Boss from the first film—the fight is partially recreated with new actors over the opening credits. An unspecified time later (this movie plays fast and loose with elapsed time), Cheng is visited by his younger brother, Cheng Chao-Jun (Lo Lieh, of Heroes of the Wild and Five Fingers of Death), who informs him that he’s there to avenge their father. This is a weird scene for two reasons: first of all, at no point in the original was an unjustly-murdered father ever mentioned. Second, the burned-on subtitles establish them as brothers, but then Chao-Jun starts talking about avenging his “father” and Chao’an’s “uncle,” so…they’re cousins?

Anyway, their conversation is overheard by another inmate (Ho Pak-Kwong, of Knockabout and The Magnificent Butcher) and his visitor (Gam Biu, of Cleopatra and the Casino of Gold). Those two men work for a Thai gang boss named Isabella (Preeva Prongernaug, of The Battle of Bang Rajan). Isabella is after a stash of gold belonging to another crime boss, who happens to be the Factor Manager from the first film (Chan Chue, the film’s director). This guy has gotten into the gold smuggling business and has accumulated some seven tons of the stuff, which Isabella wants. Her attempts to bring in outsiders to find it have come to naught, so when she learns that Cheng Chao-Jun is looking for vengeance against the same guy, she hires him to help her.

After an extended fight that starts at a casino and ends in a brothel, Cheng proves his mettle and starts the job. His job is to woo Wu (Wang Ping, of Vengeance! and Heroine Susan), the crime boss’s daughter. The two start seeing each other, but she never lets him visit her house because her dad’s a traditional guy, or so she says. At one point, the dad’s personal witch doctor (Lee Kwan, who played a different role in The Big Boss) tries to poison Cheng, but Wu saves him. Eventually, Isabella gets tired of waiting and has her second-in-command (big-time Thai actor Krung Srivilai, of H-Bomb and Tiger from River Kwai) kidnap Wu. They try to torture her into giving away the location of the gold, but Cheng saves her. 

All this results in a boat chase (set to Monty Norman’s theme for James Bond) and Cheng Chao-Jun wrestling with crocodiles, plus a gunfight between thugs from both gangs on different boats. Cheng learns that Wu’s dad is the same guy who killed his dad—Isabella had left out that detail when hiring him—and heads to the old ice factory to shore up accounts with him. Lots of kung fu ensues.

I know people say that a sign of a critic’s maturity is reviewing the film set before them and not the movie they wished they had seen. But watching this, I can’t help but think that it should have been something else. Not a completely different movie, but certainly a better movie in one of three respects. The Big Boss Part 2 should have either: a) cast a better martial artist in the lead; b) been more exploitative than it was; or c) been a lot weirder than it was.

Regarding item A, I like Lo Lieh as a martial arts actor, but as a martial arts actor, he is a bit limited. It doesn’t help that Yuen Cheung-Yan’s choreography—this guy went on to do The 7 Grand Masters and Charlie’s Angels—feels like it was elaborated in 1971 or early 1972. The fighting is pure “basher,” coming at a time when we had Shaolin shapes and Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee was starting to make his mark on cinema. Lo Lieh does his best, but his low kicks and nondescript handwork just don’t cut the mustard for 1976. It would have been better if Bruce Liang or Tan Tao-Liang had been cast in the lead role. Hell, if Bruce Le had been cast as Bruce Lee’s brother/cousin, it might have been an improvement.

Regarding item B, The Big Boss was pure exploitation, from the frequent bloody violence to the nudity from Thai actress Malalin Bonnak. This movie has some nudity in the first act: when the casino fight goes upstairs to the brothel, the combatants knock down a door and reveal a naked woman having sex with a man (we briefly see her breasts and buttocks). We get some more brief nudity when the prostitutes and their Johns start fleeing their rooms. And after that fight, Lo Lieh’s character is inexplicably seduced by Isabella, leading to a steamy sex scene. The camera placement is a bit odd, in that it just barely cuts off her bare breasts. If you’re going to tease it that extent, just go and show it. The violence in this film is also extremely tame, which is disappointing. The film alludes to one cool death at the very end, but we don’t see much. If the film were a bit more tonally consistent with the original in terms of blood and boobs, that might have helped a bit more.

Then there’s item C. Jimmy Wang Yu knew the value of out-weirding the competition when you couldn’t out-fight them. Compare the sequels to The Chinese Boxer and One-Armed Boxer to the originals, which were made when the bar was still relatively low for onscreen kung fu. The sequels were absolutely nuts, on the other hand. This film introduces a black magic wizard subplot, but needed that extra push to make it memorable. This came out a year after the Shaw Brothers horror classic Black Magic, which I understand had all sorts of nutty magical procedures. So, there was a template for that to follow This movie could have made more of that and would have found a way to set itself apart from both the original and all the other Brucesploitation films of the period. 

But as it lacks a strong exploitation, kung fu, or strange element, it makes all the problems in the story all the more glaring. I mentioned the bit about the dialog that makes it confusing whether or not the Chengs are brothers or cousins. At the end, we learn from Chao Chao-Jun that Wang Ping’s Wu is actually the daughter of the guy Cheng Chao’an killed…so is she the daughter of Han Ying-Chieh’s character. So, how many years after The Big Boss is this film set? Perhaps around 20? So Bruce Le has been lying around in the small cell for 20 years? They couldn’t transfer him to a prison that might at least have a prison yard to move around in? Moreover, how did Cheng Chao-Jun know the truth about Wu and her parentage? Nothing in the film established that he knew about it in the first place. 

I am glad that this movie is no longer lost. “Losing” movies is a terrible thing to happen to the art form. So, I’m glad that people like me can watch this. But other than the film’s curiosity value to one of the most influential martial arts films of all time, there is not a whole lot to recommend this. You would be better served re-watching The Big Boss, or if you need a Lo Lieh hit, Five Fingers of Death. Heck, Bruce Le’s maiden Brucesploitation voyage, Bruce’s Deadly Fingers, is miles ahead of this. And that also came out in 1976.